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Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time (TheVerge)
@dansup@mastodon.social: Threads hiding @pixelfed mentions, not a good look Meta 🙄
Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed (Lemmy)
That didn't take long. On my Mastodon feed this morning, I see that Threads appears to be blocking mentions of Pixelfed, an ostensible competitor to Instagram. This is a little rude of me, but let's be real: people use what's easy, and the Fediverse has the appearance of friction, even if, in my experience anyway, that's nowhere near the case. People know that Instagram's easy. Instagram's what your friends use, but also Kim Kardashian and also more than a billion others. Pixelfed has ordinary people, not celebrities, not influencers. The UI is similar, but the purposes are miles apart.
Regardless, Threads appears to be suppressing mentions of it, though I only found out secondhand, via Mastodon and then Lemmy. I didn't see anything about this on Threads itself because I'm not on Threads, and don't see myself being there, either. While I caved and got a Bluesky account late last year, that was because the poets with an ounce of countercultural sentiment made accounts there. Most of the rest are still elsewhere; Facebook or Instagram, mostly, the natural home of people who don't want to think about how they use their computer or their phone or their time. But Bluesky siphoned off the Twitter refugees, or at least some of them, given that a lot of people made a big show of leaving, then went right back to their discussions in their cozy corner of the Nazi bar.
Threads, on the other hand, is a corporate plant, a hastily put together beta designed to capture more eyeballs to monetize more tracking for blah blah blah. It's Meta, so you know exactly what it is. I'm tired of that, and of them.
So I don't have a Threads account, and I'm not going to make one, and so I don't have any way of verifying the truth of today's reports. But it tracks, you know? As was noted in the Mastodon thread above, they've done this before, suppressing mentions of Telegram on WhatsApp back in 2015. So it's not hard to see Pixelfed get added to a badwords list similar at the request of a product manager. Sometimes the reality of these things really is that banal.
It appears that Instagram is blocking the #joinpixelfed hashtag. We wonder why 😉
And, of course, there was that time when Instagram blocked mentions of Pixelfed, too. Which is why I don't believe it's a mistake this time, that Meta is talking out of both sides of its mouth: that they want to federate Threads (because it'll bring more eyeballs, and more content to vacuum up), while at the same time having no intentions of ever playing nice. Google and XMPP all over again. Only this time, Not-Threads is a pretty rabid contingent of never-Meta types (like me) who will never sign up for their service. So it's not Embrace/Extend/Extinguish all over again, even if some people at Meta think that what all the Fediverse nerds really needed was another dollop of slop.
At worst, Threads will be widely blocked. Will they get to the point where the Fediverse is effectively cut off? That'll be an interesting set of decisions. To do that, you'd have to convince the biggest instances (ie, mastodon.social). Some big ones do block it - mas.to comes to mind - but so far it seems to be an action taken by a lot of smaller instances. A lot of admins seem to be giving Meta the benefit of the doubt, and I'll admit that it is a complicated decision. You can't claim to be an open federation if you immediately block the biggest players.
Maybe that'll change. I kind of expect it will, that we'll see more and more blocks of Threads at the instance level, maybe almost as a by-default thing. My own instance federates, but that's fine. We have controls at the user level. For those who want to, you can add it to your own blocklist; I did this months ago. We might be bound by the terrible search results that Google and others give us, but not every facet of online life is under corporate control. The Fediverse has tools to shape the content we receive. And the internet I want to see has nothing to do with the cattle pens and feedbags of dullard billionaires.